Le Mort d'Author

What is the role of technology in our lives?
Is a rich full life possible if you haven't set foot in every continent?
Does the universe conspire to help us?
When you put peeps in the microwave...?
Do tribulations exist as a sort of secular penance, the weedwhackers of evolution?
Questions to the lone sun, which is our destination star, what's for dinner?

In darkness there is the strength of absent friends and lovers. The bleeding artic sky, northern lights, aurora borealis, a hemorrhage of ghosts, dancing away their once shamed prudence.

"These were they who objected to newness
HERE are their TOMBSTONES"
-Ezra Pound

The Man in the Mask ran into an old friend in the Boston winds. Wrapped up in the upturned collar of a partitioned gloomy coat, looking ravaged and pale. Winter's toll on Comedy.
"How have you been old friend?" Asked the Masked.
"I can't remember ever feeling better. But doctor just told me this morning that I have cancer," said Comedy with tragic wry evocation. Pallid teeth smiling through shivering chapped lips.
"How can you say you feel great then?"
"He also told me I have Alzheimer's."
"I'm sorry! You don't look that bad."
"Hey back off sorryman. I don't swing that way."
"Haha. So the doctor told you that you have cancer and alzheimer's!?!"
"Yeah. What a relief though, eh? At least I don't have cancer!"
Comedy writes poems with refrigerator magnets and sometimes disappears from the Masked Man's life for months at a time only to call up out of the blue to ask the best question in the world.
"Do chickens have boogers?"


Yesterday's hot tabloids line today's wet gutters while the crumpled sketchpads of Rembrandts and Whistlers sell at auction hundreds of years down the line, for millions of dollars. Tree pulp fictions. Are we paper? Are people without convictions just runny too-soon-fade ink on a page? Why are some stories writ in stone and so many others etched in the sand?

To think of The Mighty Struggles of sailing men, viewed from the captain's chair, on the space station, everything lucid blues. The color of longing.

Sand, sea...
space, tree...
Sun, we...

...ask more important questions:
How about this 'Internet' phenomenon? You think it is here to stay?
Just another sandstone?

There's a moment between verses, an empty lulling space in time where I wonder if this is where I'm meant to be. A pause. A silence. And then, maybe, the chorus.

The Deaths of friends are but cheerful invitations to make a life of equal simplicity. Sooner or later the entropy of our lives must reconcile with the softspoken rhythms of a graveyard where all our friends are headstones and all whim dictated by the dance of the seasons.

There's not much else to say except goodbye. Could that be a question? Goodbye?